November 24, 2018

The New Aging - Yes, Youth Should Envy Us (especially our fierce self-acceptance)

Media outlets, public policy planners, career experts, and even our own families position and package us aging baby boomers as a "problem" society has to solve and then manage.

Yet, it's likely that younger generations will come to envy us.

What we have going for us is hammered in the just-released documentary video "The Blessings of Aging" by The New Yorker. Directed by Jenny Schweitzer, it presents interviews with residents of a retirement home. Here you can view it.

At the top of the list of our blessings is, finally, the gift of self-acceptance.

One female resident is New York-blunt. She tells those who don't embrace who she is as she is "There's the door." Her voice is raised. Her facial expression is all-business.

This is related to another blessing.

That is the loss of inhibitions. Emotionally and socially the residents now go into the world daily without self-c0nsciousness. Unlike the locked-in-himself aging narrator of the T.S. Eliot poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," they don't fret if they should or should not eat a peach in public.

The third gift, one male resident points out, is that we "get away with stuff." Somehow society gives us a few free passes. Actually in this harsh era of the second decade of the 21st century, there seems to be a gentleness toward us.

During a major snow last year, one Millennial in my rental complex removed much of the snow from my car. And after an ice storm, another steered me off the ice. Neither wanted payment. I had to force it on them.

Of course, another key gain from aging is wisdom. The residents certainly sound savvy about the world in general and their little worlds. That comes out in their ironic points of view. How they see life is beyond funny. It's joy and sorrow filtered through a cool kind of insight.

A producer could create a comedy show in which several of the residents are characters. For example, the females grouse, lovingly, about the male residents who wear their pants too high. A male jokes about how he has to go downtown to find a worthy chess opponent to take on.

Those young people who flock to Buddhist retreats to find inner peace might just spend a few hours at this type of retirement home. They will meet up with people who have learned to love themselves, no matter what.

Isn't it self-hate, generated by toxic perfectionism, which is killing the best and brightest professionals and college students?

The most recent example of that is 42-year-old brandname bankruptcy lawyer Gabe MacConaill. In the parking lot of his law firm, he shot himself to death.

The American Bar Association and other professional trade groups should create pilot programs to study the cognitive processes in retirement homes and establish experiments in how to transmit them to those who can't let up on themselves.

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